To mix things up, I’ll have a quick look at two classics reaching
their milestones this year from a true legend of cinema—Alfred Hitchcock. The
man’s influence on the medium can and has been the discussion of entire books—with
Pyscho alone, we can draw trees of influences across decades of the horror and
thriller genre. With The Birds, we can do much of the same; and then there’s
all the tricks he pioneered, like the dolly zoom—where the camera retract and
zooms, something you’ve probably seen hundreds of times in pictures of every
quality, but imitation as we know is the highest form of flattery.
First up, turning sixty this year, is North by Northwest—a fun
little espionage flick that arguably subverts a lot of the espionage flick
tropes before they were even a thing. Before Connery slipped into a tuxedo,
before the Man from Uncle, before the Avengers (no, not those ones), Cary Grant
was Roger Thornhill, a somewhat easygoing New York executive. Thanks to putting
his hand up at just the wrong second in a restaurant (in a blink and you’ll miss
it moment that shows Hitchcock’s attention to detail), he gets whisked away by nefarious
spies, and has to trick and bumble his way through people trying to kill him,
manipulate him, or get him drunk.
Straight away, we can see that Thornhill is no master spy—but
a schmuck in the game, who’s trying to figure everything out as he goes along.
Immediately, you want to root for him in all this, and to some extent, that
makes for a more interesting character arc than the escapist fantasies of Bond
or Emma Peel. And as such, it makes it all the more satisfying when he does
manage to BS his way through situations—like one genuinely amusing scene where
he makes a disgrace out of a fancy auction far better than any really stupid History
Channel shows could. There's enough good solid wit and snarky jokes in there to keep up the fun aspects.
That’s not to say there’s no good action either—and for the
time, it’s nicely done as you’d expect. An early scene has Thornhill careening around
a nighttime road while doused with alcohol, which is very tightly edited and
lacks the comical rear projection you’d see in other films of the period (you
know, where people veer the wheel around like they’re in a dodgem while
apparently on a straight road). Then there’s the famous crop duster scene. In
the context of the plot, it’s a damn elaborate way for the bad guys to try and
kill him, but who cares? It’s awesome, explosions ensue, and it ramps up the
stakes once more.
And, in another way it differs from the future spy flicks,
the film takes a somewhat cynical view of both sides of the Cold War, as Kubrick would a few years later. Thornhill is taken in by a presumably American agency,
who prove just as manipulative even if they’re not trying to kill him, and some
dour comments are made about the nature of the espionage game as a whole. You
never really had Roger Moore make these sorts of comments while he was blowing
up underwater nuke bases.
Overall, sixty years on, North by Northwest is still a fun
and well-made flick, and if you haven’t really watched any of Hitchcock’s filmography,
I can name this (or possibly Psycho) as the perfect place to start. Some parts,
as Thornhill is introduced to his lady friend and later damsel in distress Eve (Eve Marie Saint),
might drag slightly, but once it gets to the final confrontation on the
suitably epic vistas of Mount Rushmore, that won’t matter. It’s no wonder this
one’s seen play adaptations and the like—if you haven’t seen it, do so. It’s
one classic you’ll enjoy.
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